“My wife has done nothing wrong.”
“You ask me to save this white woman?” Splitfoot said with an exasperated sigh. “Why? How will she help us?”
“She will—”
“I have suffered, Omar. The Tatinga have suffered. Our sister tribes have all suffered. How will you suffer for me, Omar?”
Omar dropped his head in what I read as shame; perhaps it was only respect.
“Answer me!” he roared. “How will you suffer for me? What will you give me?”
Omar gestured at me. “Here is my suffering, in the body of my wife.”
Splitfoot’s chair squealed as he whipped around toward me, glowering with rage. “How have you suffered?”
“I—”
“Don’t show me the wounds on your body. I am not interested. Show me your dead babies, your family starving because there is no game. Show me your empty forests, your poisoned rivers. Your dead spirit.”
It hit me then, even lost as I was in the cage of my own agony, that I didn’t have a corner on suffering or despair. Here, now, it was time to justify my existence with some sort of rationale that had nothing to do with my own misery.
“Who are you?” Splitfoot spat out. “Why should I let you live? Tell me.”
“In my country,” I said, “I am a shaman.”
Splitfoot snorted his derision. He wrenched his wheelchair around and began to screech his way back into the shadowy rooms, ropey arms pumping. A night bird called mournfully as it soared across the vast black sky.
I stumbled toward him, trying to cancel out the noise around me. Just before he vanished into his lair, I called out to him in my head, “IN MY COUNTRY, I AM A SHAMAN.”
He turned, his expression layered in fear, curiosity, and wonder. He said, “Who do you hunt with at night?”
I dropped my head in my hands, conjuring the whispering diamond scales and hot breath of the female anaconda that had visited me in my dreams while Omar was hunting, the one seeking revenge for his killing its mate. “MY SPIRIT HUNTS WITH THE ANACONDA.”
Slowly, Splitfoot turned his wheelchair toward me. “I have seen you in my dreams,” he said. “I have seen you by the Black Lake.”
“If you help me,” I said, “if you let me live, I will help the Tatinga. I promise you.”
He glared at me without expression. After a full minute, he gave me the slightest of nods before wheeling himself out of sight into the gloom of the roundhouse.
FORTY
They didn’t wait until morning, Omar made sure of it, his haste heightening my fear. The women who had at first run from me because they believed—according to Omar—the tale that white-skinned people strip the flesh of Indians to make fuel to fly to the moon, spread out into the night jungle with torches and gathered the plant, armfuls of an unremarkable-looking pale-green fern. They boiled down a dozen bushels into a mush, mixing it with animal fat to make a paste. While Omar slept in a nearby hammock, three Tatinga women led me to a firelit area in the roundhouse made private by two screens of split bamboo.
Chattering softly, they helped me peel off my dress in the smoke-filled room. It dropped to the hard dirt at my feet, a little pile of unthinkably filthy burlap. In their eyes, I saw just how bad I looked, and as they spoke, I hallucinated that I understood every word. There was kindness and maybe a little fear in their faces, voices, hands. They helped me get down to my knees and lie down on my side on a mat of woven palm fibers. The sound of their necklaces of heavy beads and small shells clacking together calmed me, their whiskered faces hovering over mine like curious human cats. One kept touching my hair, but I’d stopped caring about that. Buzzing all around me, they placed flat, wide clay basins at my shoulders and hips, layering the warm poultice thickly on my skin. Wherever it touched my lesions, the pain was indescribable. A rich green smell, like basil mixed with grassy dung, filled my lungs and brain.
In a lilting call-and-response pattern, the women sang and chanted as they worked; the rhythm soothing, a narcotic. Every now and then, one of their children would run in, their eyes wide with an instinctual fear of sickness. The women would turn them, nudging them toward the main living area where another adult would scoop them up and take them away, cooing.
As the poultice dried, it hardened like clay. The women pressed down gently, snapping off sections, then brushing off the remainder with their hands. Piles of green flakes surrounded me. The second they were done with one round, they applied another wet layer, each time singing and chanting over that area, blowing smoke at me from a banana-leaf cigar. Each time a fresh layer was ladled over me, tiny daggers stabbed deeper, battling their cellular war. I shut my eyes picturing this, trying to rally my own weakened defenses. I don’t remember making a sound.
* * *
In a few days, I was able to get up and walk around a little bit; the pregnant teenager who was so fond of my hair—the one who brought me the calabash of water that first day—constantly at my side. Bright crimson stained her face from ear to ear; an iridescent beetle-wing bracelet shone on her small wrist. Her name sounded like Pulia; Omar said it meant “Sprouting Leaf.”
She brought me water to bathe in, took my dress away, washed and boiled it, then brought it back decorated with a circle of kapok fluff the women had sewn in around the neckline; they believed the spirits of the tree would help protect me.
Omar and Splitfoot talked late into the evenings, cooking fires popping and smoking all around them. Among the gentle chatter of the women as they peeled manioc and nursed babies, the soft thud of their bare feet as they swept the hard dirt floors, men smoking and repairing weapons, I felt—for those few days—immersed in a cocoon of humanity I never felt in Ayachero, or really anywhere I had ever been before or since. I felt like an infant; in fact, the part of me that remained infantile took note, soaked it all in, let myself be healed in all sorts of ways. Mostly I lay on my mat, my fever spiking then easing with each application of the poultice, the women tirelessly applying it to the places on my body I couldn’t reach, or making sure the dry patches were brushed off and fresh salve applied. I was grateful for the agony each dosing brought; I could feel the battle tilting my way. It’s going to be okay, I told my baby, you’re going to be welcomed into the world, you’re going to be loved.
I listened to the creak of the hammocks as the men slept in shifts; for safety reasons, at no time was the entire village asleep. Sprouting Leaf was always at my side when I woke, either sleeping next to me or tending to my lesions. Omar taught me a few words of Tatinga, translating Sprouting Leaf’s endless stream of chatter. She said that the plants wouldn’t work unless I had a good heart; since she could see I was healing, the women were happy to help. Mostly she talked about wanting to be a shaman, but that she had a lot of training to do and was looking for a teacher. She told us that Beya had eased a terrible fever her father had suffered, with a tincture made from a certain kind of bark, and asked us countless questions we couldn’t answer about whether she might return.
On the evening before we left, Sprouting Leaf watched me admire the young boys practicing their blowguns. They could nail a butterfly jig-jagging in the air or a lizard zipping across the dirt. With a few words in Tatinga, I commented on their uncanny aim. She ran off to her family’s area of the roundhouse and returned with a foot-long child-sized blowgun, a bamboo container filled with five palm spikes—darts—and a much smaller section of bamboo sealed with rubber and filled with curare, the poison to dip the darts in. Smiling, Omar translated that she was afraid I would stab myself with the darts, so that’s why she kept the toxin separate.
“She wants to make a trade,” he said. “She says the blowgun is for our little boy, if she can have some of your hair.”
“What do you think?”
“Just say yes,” he said. “Always say yes here.”
Drink the masato. Eat the monkey arm. Let the women coat you in green mud. Give Sprouting Leaf a lock of your hair; yes, yes, yes.
That evening, “
some” of my hair quickly turned into all of my hair when the women sat me by the fire. Singing the whole time, they shaved my head with a set of piranha jaws. Sprouting Leaf did her work with such care I barely felt it, not once nicking my scalp; in half an hour I was a bald, green-fleshed, hugely pregnant gringa. Afterward, she took me aside and showed me how to use the blowgun, demonstrating how to sight my target through a V created by two paca teeth set inside the pipe, and how to lay each dart along a nest of kapok fluff to steady it. She gestured for me to practice, the hollow eyes of a monkey skull grinning from the rafters my target.
* * *
Omar and I left at dawn on the sixth day. Mist boiled over the roundhouse, the desolate cries of the piha bird announcing the new morning. Wearing a liana belt and several bracelets shot through with the shining copper of my own hair, Sprouting Leaf stood under the palm eave of the main entrance to the roundhouse. Her goodbye was just a solemn nod, but I had to remind myself that hugging and smiling and expressing big emotions wasn’t something that happened in this place. I slung a string bag over my shoulder, another gift she had made for me out of woven chambira fronds; she swore it was strong enough to hold a hundred-pound peccary. Now it contained the blowgun, darts, and curare. I touched the bag and nodded back at her before turning away from the roundhouse and the people who had saved my life, following Omar and a few Tatinga hunters into the green morass.
MiddleEye blasted along the jungle path, two more hunters behind him, all of them carrying leather bags on their backs filled with the heavy plaster. I carried a much lighter bag packed full of the leaves, as did Omar. These we could mix with fat in Ayachero. Chunks of the green clay flaked off my arms and legs as I walked, the edges of the lesions crusted over but still weeping. Twice I doubled over with shooting pains in my belly and back; this time the ache radiated down my legs. Were these real contractions? All Omar could do was help me to my feet again. There was no time for discussion: the hunters never slowed down, and we would have been utterly lost without them.
The boat was where we’d left it. In just six days, a dozen vines had grown around it in tight loops and had it on lockdown. Once the men chopped the boat free, Omar dumped it over, releasing into the river a family of small green snakes coiled into a cozy pile in the bottom.
MiddleEye and the men dropped the bags of poultice into the boat and left without ceremony of any kind, not a goodbye, not even a backward glance. The jungle closed behind them as if the entire experience had all been a dream.
The river coursed swollen along the bank, stronger and higher by several feet than when we arrived. Omar made a bed out of the soft bags of leaves under the thatch awning that tented one end of the canoe and settled me there.
“Take off your dress, Lily.”
“Really?” I considered begging him to give me a few hours’ break. Each treatment was like painting on misery.
“Come on. You need this stuff on you all the time.”
With a sigh, I peeled off my dress and tried to get comfortable on the bags; the hot breath of the river prickling my skin. Stained in lighter and darker patches of sage by the poultice, my skin looked like beech bark.
Omar kissed my bald head, dipped his hand in one of the bags, and spread green goop across my shoulders. Tears seeped from my eyes.
“Your skin is looking better,” he said.
I didn’t care if he was making it up. The words comforted me and I loved him for saying them. He rinsed his hands in the river and pulled out a beat-up sheet of notebook paper from his back pocket. His capital-lettered sentences filled the pages.
“I finished this while you were sleeping,” he said, sitting on the gunwale, bare feet touching my swollen belly. “You know you slept for almost two days, right?”
I smiled. “You did your assignment?” I felt like a wet grub, shivering under cool, green mud.
He cupped my cheek, kissing me tenderly before he cleared his throat and read:
“ ‘Dear Baby Boy,
“ ‘I am your proud father, a native Amazonian. Your mother is a beautiful American seamstress who loves the jungle life.’ ” (A little smile to me here.) “ ‘I am learning English for you, because your parents want to give you knowledge, to make you understand what choices are in your life, because the world is different from when I am a baby boy. I know that with my strength, and the soul and kindness and magic of your mother, you grow to a man who can survive any world, the jungle world, the civilizado world, the Ayachero world, and the world of any tribe in Bolivia, even the ones who kill on sight. They do not kill you, because you are high up in the trees as they pass under, you hide in holes only you know exist, your arrows fly sooner than theirs, you run faster, the anaconda dies from your machete before he can close his jaws on your flesh, and always, dear one, your stomach is full from your own cleverness—’ ”
The sound of a gun cocking stopped him cold. Dutchie emerged from a thatch of tall ferns near the bank. He walked quickly toward us, carbine lifted.
Omar sprung to his feet, the tattered paper flying out of his hands as he reached for his knife, the only weapon the Tatinga had let us keep. I went from mesmerized by Omar’s beautiful letter to a ball of terror in the pit of the boat, snatching at my dress to cover myself.
“I like it, Omar,” he said, smiling his snaggle-toothed smile, eyes arctic blue under stringy-blond bangs, sweat-soaked bandana tied around his forehead and half-an-ear. A threadbare shirt and rope-belted shorts hung off his gaunt frame. “I think I’ll call you Shakespeare from now on. Carlos’d hate that. Cuz he’s the bard, see?”
I slipped my dress over my body, my string bag over my shoulder.
“Problem is, the stupid fucker isn’t here to piss off. Nahh, he’d never believe ol’ Dutchie took control for once, which is why he’s going to lose, lose, lose—”
“Where is he?” Omar said, stepping out of the boat. He coolly took a few steps toward the poacher, blocking me.
“In Ayachero, looking for you. All the guys are there, waiting. Getting bored, drinking, screwing all your women.” He grinned at the thought of this. “I’ll have my turn, but first things first. You,” he said to me. “Get out of the boat.”
“My wife is ill—”
“And ready to pop one out I guess!” He gestured with the gun. “Get the fuck out of the boat.”
Steadying myself with the seat, I stepped out onto the wet sand.
“Give me all your weapons.”
Omar tossed the knife a few feet from Dutchie, who scrambled for it and tucked it in his belt.
“You. Give me that bag. Toss it over here.”
I did what he asked. He dumped the contents out on the ground: blowgun, darts, curare. In despair I gazed at our only remaining weapons scattered on the sand.
“What is this, Tatinga shit?” He gave the blowgun a swift kick; it flew off into the vegetation nearby. “Where’re your guns?”
“The Tatinga took them.”
He walked a slow circle around Omar. “Take off your shirt. Turn around. Empty your pockets.”
He did as he was asked, slowly, deliberately.
Dutchie lowered his gun and shot just inches from my right foot, blowing a hole in the sand. I jumped two feet to the left, my heart slamming in my chest.
“You better not be fucking lying to me.” He swung the gun first at me, then Omar, then back at me—at my belly. “You. Get over here.”
Omar gave me a small nod. Head down, I walked past him, feeling his warm breath on my neck. The moment I was in reach, Dutchie seized me around the shoulders, slammed me against his hard breastbone, and jammed the cold muzzle of the gun against the skin just above my left ear. I imagined my brains exploding out the other side.
“You’re taking me to the grove, or she dies.”
“The grove is days away,” Omar said. “Two upriver, two on foot.”
Out of the corner of my eye I watched Dutchie’s face screw up; maybe he hadn’t counted on this. Maybe he’d rea
lized his miscalculation and would let us go. His stinking breath filled my nose as he ground the O of metal harder into my flesh; I heard the subtle flicking of his finger against the trigger, an unscratchable itch. He gripped me tighter, I could barely get enough air, the tang of his sweat searing my lungs.
“Fine,” he said. “Get in the boat, both of you.”
Omar shifted his weight to his other foot. I prayed he wasn’t planning on rushing him. “I have to bring those bags of leaves with us. Otherwise she’ll die.”
“Get the fuck in the boat.” The muzzle drilled deeper into my forehead.
“Not without the bags.”
“Get the fuck in the boat.”
“I’ll—” I sputtered.
“Stay where you are, Lily,” Omar said with unimaginable calm.
A troop of spider monkeys rattled the branches above us; nuts and small branches rained down. Dutchie jerked me harder to him; my collarbone bending under his vise grip. “You think I’m kidding?” he growled. “I don’t need her, understand?”
“This ends here without those bags.”
“Oh yeah? Oh yeah?” Dutchie shifted his weight, and I helplessly shifted with him. “Who’s the boss here? You forgettin’ already? Old Dutchie. At the reins. And I will kill her.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He sputtered out a laugh, releasing me, before he wound up and clocked me over the head with the butt of the gun. I fell forward onto the sand, blood dripping from a gash on my forehead. Dazed, I looked up at Omar. His eyes pleaded with me to stay where I was.
“We need the bags. Then we’ll go.”
“You son of a bitch.” Dutchie head-gestured toward our boat. “Wasting my fucking time. Put the shit in the canoe. Make it fast.”
Dutchie followed Omar to our canoe, shadowing him closely. I stayed crouched on the sand, watching, head throbbing from my wound. Omar slipped me the subtlest glance before bending over and rummaging among the bags.
“Quit screwing around or your bald green bitch is history.”
Into the Jungle Page 26